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Research

  • Visiting scholar Vincent Lostanlen, alongside colleagues from various institutions, has released the second stable version of Kymatio, a software package for wavelet scattering in Python. Compared to its predecessor, Kymatio v0.2 has a greater interoperability with machine learning libraries: it supports PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Numpy as backends, and Keras and scikit-learn as frontends.
  • A new peer-reviewed article by Professor Debra Laefer was selected to be the lead story and cover of the journal Buildings. Learn more about her research on “Introduction of the Intermeshed Steel Connection—A New Universal Steel Connection” here.
  • Congratulations to Professor Debra Laefer, who has been appointed to the editorial board of the Remote Sensing Journal! Remote Sensing is the third highest ranking publication under the topic of remote sensing.

Publications

  • Visiting Scholar Chaogui Kang has a new paper been accepted for publication:
    • Chaogui Kang, Dongwan Fan, Hongzan Jiao. “Validating Activity, Time and Space Diversity as Essential Components of Urban Vitality.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.
    • Urbanization’s rapid progress presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of “the death and life of cities” (a.k.a. “the essential diversity conditions for the urban built environment”). Despite the importance of activity diversity (i.e., serving different primary functions), existing works ignored that time diversity (i.e., attracting people at different times of the day) and space diversity (i.e., attracting people from different districts) also play important roles in promoting urban life in large cities. With assistance of human mobility and crowdsourcing data, this article thoroughly validates whether activity, time and space diversity are essential and inseparable components of urban vitality in the Wuhan, China context. To achieve the goal, POI data are utilized to quantitatively measure activity diversity, human mobility data are adopted for building quantitative metrics of time diversity and space diversity, and a detailed urban perception map is crowdsourced as ground truth data for establishing a regression model between urban diversity indicators and urban vitality. The resultant regression model succeeds to decouple the relationship between population concentration, activity diversity, time diversity, space diversity and urban vitality. It confirms that activity diversity together with time diversity and space diversity has stronger association with urban vitality than any single diversity indicator. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we provided a comprehensive collection of metrics for measuring urban diversity; (2) we confirmed that activity, time and space diversity are essential components of urban vitality; and (3) our methodology can be replicated at scale to understand urban vitality under various geographic, societal and economic contexts due to easy accessibility of similar datasets.

Education

It’s not too late to apply to CUSP – we extended our final application deadline! Apply by May 15th to join us in Fall 2020. Ready to finish your application?